Month: June 2014

I don’t own any stock in iD(bethesda), or let alone steam. This is just a small research thing so I’m not shilling. Also Ultimate DOOM, is on sale, although not for long. I thought it would be interesting to compare the version on steam with the original version of Doom. Now backtracking, Ultimate DOOM, was a boxed in version of DOOM, that included all the patches, and added in an extra level to the classic DOOM 1, “thy flesh consumed“.

Ultimate DOOM

And this is the version of DOOM that is for sale on steam. Now the nice thing about Ultimate DOOM, is that it was released as a patch to registered users of DOOM so that they too could upgrade to Ultimate DOOM, and enjoy the new levels. So that also means that the enthusiasts thankfully made a patch to regress Ultimate DOOM to version 1.1 First we start with Ultimate DOOM, which can be found in your steam directory. Mine is “C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Ultimate Doom\base”, but yours will be similar. So the first step would be to copy this directory to somewhere else, as we are going to run some patches against it to alter the level as we go. I’m going to use DOSBox to do all of this. Also in my setup of DOSBox, I mount my c:\dos directory as c:\ to make life easier for me. So on my windows side, I copy Ultimate Doom\base into c:\dos\temp\udoom. That way when I fire up DOSBox, I see it under c:\temp\udoom. The only files I’m going to use from steam are:

Noticeably absent is SETUP.EXE. I have no idea why it is missing, so I figured I’d provide a collection of the various setup programs. This is the best way to change sound card settings, and alter keyboard bindings. Why it was omitted, well I have no idea. You can download my combined archive of doom setup programs here. Place the utlimate doom setup into the directory. Then download & extract downgrd.zip, into your dosbox doom directory (c:\dos\temp\udoom), then fireup dosbox and run patch.bat . The downgrade uses a shareware version of MDIFF, so it will delay for 5 seconds every time it’s used (which is a few times) so this will take a little while.

And everything looks ok. Now FILE_ID.DIZ was a nice way back in the day of BBS’s to have a description of the file inside of the ZIP that would automatically set the description. And the FILE_ID.DIZ from the registered version is:

████▓▒░ THIS IS PIRATED SOFTWARE! ░▒▓████ ███████████████████████████████████████████
THIS FILE IS NOT SHAREWARE — it is ILLEGAL and forbidden to upload this copyrighted software on bulletin boards. If you see this message on a BBS, please request that the Sysop remove this software IMMEDIATELY. or contact id Software @ 214-613-0132 IT IS ILLEGAL TO GET THIS FILE FROM A BBS!
███████████████████████████████████████████

Which I guess is not all that surprising. So other than omitting this one file (which does not alter game play in the least bit) we have now taken Ultimate DOOM from steam, and reverted it to DOOM v1.1. Now to be honest this is my favorite version, it feels faster than later versions,and for me at least it was more stable. However as I’ve mentioned before the network play would destroy old hub based 10Mbit networks. And running DOOM, we can check the version

DOOM v1.1

And you can see that we have downgraded Ultimate DOOM to registered DOOM v1.1 in it’s original state from December 10th, 1993. Now moving to version 1.2, you need the file dm1_2rpt.zip, which contains:

Which as you can see the only files that really made the cut were the wad and the doom executable. I don’t know why they omitted the setup program, but that’s easy enough to fix. And running our patched up executable:

Ultimate DOOM

And as we can see, the extra level ‘thy flesh consumed’ is now available!

So there we go, a full round trip from Ultimate DOOM, v1.1, v1.2, v1.666, v1.8, v1.9 and back to Ultimate DOOM!

UPDATE!

While looking around I noticed that the steam version of DOOM also only uses the Adlib! for music. But DOOM really does have much better MIDI music.

Adlib. really.

Well one of the great things we can do with a setup program, and the WAD/DOOM.EXE we copied out of steam is that we can run it with a newer version of DOSBox, say version 0.74 where the General MIDI actually works! So go ahead, and run setup, and change the music card to “General MIDI”.

Change it to General MIDI

Next it’ll give a wide range of ports, I used 330.

Port 330!

Now when you save the config, and re-launch DOOM you can experience the music without the major pain of setting up the UltraSound. And General MIDI is available in every version of DOOM as well.

So I had a few disk images in the CopyQM formwat, and trying to get an emulator to output them back to a disk image is well.. really trying. Then as luck would have it, I stumbled onto the program read_cqm.c and it does exactly what it says it’ll do which is read the CopyQM disk images, and then output them into a raw format.

2014/4/15I has integrated source of i386 and i286 edition edition. In addition, in the i286 version, I added support for int 10h/16h. equivalent to 0.149 MAME, I was replaced with a 0.152 equivalent MAME core i386 i286 core. However, the i386 core, I have omit the TLB around.

Which is very cool, although I wasn’t sure about the MAME source code being open to other projects…? I tried to contact the i86/i386 author vlinde but he then pulled his contact page. I wanted to use i386 for something of my own, but the whole “Redistributions may not be sold, nor may they be used in a commercial product or activity.” really puts the damper on it.

I was able to get some simple XMS test program to run, but nothing of any substance. No DOS4G/W or anything like that. But if you re-build it specifying MS-DOS version 5.0, some of the MS-DOS utils and even command.com work!

The weird issue I had was running out of conventional RAM, because this program gives you nearly 1MB of conventional RAM… I was surprised, as I wasn’t expecting that much!

There was some minor issues with the way it handles for loops, but making them more C89 friendly was trivial.

8086tiny on NT 4.0

You can download my project (source and binary) here. The ‘killer’ feature is that it being built with Visual Studio 97 on NT 4, the needed Visual C++ LIBC DLL ought to be in place on anything modern these days.

You can always find the home page for 8086tiny, right here, at megalith.co.uk. Code is maintained on github.

And I have to say, that it looks and feels a *LOT* of what became Active Directory.

So let’s look at a few things through the guide.

Top features of MSMQ are:

Connectionless messaging. With store-and-forward message queuing, applications are not affected by network fluctuations and do not have to establish sessions. Because MSMQ uses a sessionless model at the application level, the sender and receiver do not need to support the same protocol. MSMQ supports Internet Protocol (IP) and Internet Packet eXchange (IPX).

Network traffic prioritization. Message prioritization allows urgent or important traffic to preempt less important traffic so you can guarantee adequate response time for critical applications at the expense of less important applications.

Guaranteed delivery. Messages can be logged to a disk-based queue to provide guaranteed delivery.

Which for 1997 technology sounds pretty great! But obviously what is the cost? To deploy MSMQ you *NEED* the following:

Install a PEC (Primary Enterprise Controller).

Install a PSC (Primary Site Controller) at each additional site

Define site links and costs

Install MSMQ dependent clients and independent clients

Optionally you can install for greater redundancy and speed..

Install a BSC (Backup Site Controller) at each site, if required

Install MSMQ routing servers, if required

Install the connectors and transports, if required

As you may guess MSMQ needs a server infrastructure of it’s own. I thought for my limited experiment, I would use a simple two site network, comprising of a Windows NT 4.0 PDC, a Windows NT 4.0 BDC and two Windows NT 4.0 workstations.

As MSMQ stores it’s topology database in SQL Server 6.5 service pack 3, I found out the hard way that It will not install correctly with SQL Server 7. Nor will it work with sp1, and it’ll bomb with 2. It must be SP3. I’ve also found it works best with the ‘restricted’ cut down version specifically for MSMQ. Which is on CD2 of the Enterprise edition of Windows NT 4.0 (I stuck a copy here). Basically it’s 6.5 slip-streamed to SP3, with no books (don’t’ try to install the books!). However I found it works best on the PDC, and installing it on a BDC you should set the SQL services to login as local system for the installation, then set them for a domain account. I also had to change the security model to “Windows NT Integrated”. I’m not sure if that is 100% a requirement, but the installer demanded it.

Setting SQL’s security to Integrated mode

With that out of the way, I ran setup from the option pack, selecting MSMQ.

Select MSMQ

And the install proceeds as normal installing the base components of IIS 4.0.

Select a MSMQ type

Then we get to decide what kind of Server this Server will become. The first server I installed this on was the PDC, so I made it the PEC. It installed without any further incident.

I installed the option pack on the BDC, which was located in a different network, and set it up as the PSC. I then installed the workstation option pack on both of my workstations making them independent clients, and assigning them to their closest PEC/PSC.

MSMQ Enterprise

As you can see the Enterprise view of MSMQ looks a LOT like the AD Sites and Computers view. No doubt MSMQ was on the way to Cairo.. Although I’ve always thought Exchange would have been better served by SQL, having directory services being hosted on SQL would have made life a bit easier for doing backups and restores, making it less of a black box. However the prospect of managing all those SQL servers.. I guess there is always trade offs.

MSMQ in action

This is a small ‘demo’ application where MSMQ can pass messages between a shared paintbrush application. Very cool stuff. And no doubt a missed opportunity to run something fun and subversive. Although I was always the network admin so I never had to hide my traffic.

I’ve setup MSMQ in 2000 & 2003 networks, and it is not only far more simpler to deploy, but it relies on Active Directory to figure out it’s topology, and nominated MSMQ servers to forward traffic between sites. I’m more surprised that AD doesn’t rely on MSMQ, but rather it seems it uses common technology.

And this is what the internet has become, gone are the days of open connected system, but instead tolls to be paid to trolls as idiots believe their services are legit.

I always thought things would fall apart in censorship (which sure happens), lawyers, and idiotic patents, but I never thought of arbitrary tolls from no name, fly by night companies like this “lashback.com”.

What really amazes me, is that they actually want to demand a $20 ransom for me being able to send email, and I foolishly gave them (and verified) my email address, so without a doubt I’ll see my SPAM volume increase drastically. So the joke is if you tried to move away from google, you are unable to do so as these NSA friendly companies will no doubt do their best to keep you stuck.

Obviously I got into the wrong business, as people are scared of the big bad internet, and there is money to be made by ‘allowing’ open protocols to function.

I found a simple c server and client program that was ported to decnet. And it was easy enough to follow I thought I’d try something fun. So I took Synchronet 3.00c and started to identify the winsock tcpip portions and then slowly alter them to either stubs or being more decnet friendly.

Surprisingly this wasn’t so hard.

The hard part is that decnet doesn’t have a telnet like protocol, and I don’t have enough patience to try to reverse how ctermd works, so with a lot of searching I found a semi simple telnet client and mostly got it running on decnet. Right now I have issues resolving address, so it is hardcoded.

I have to admit it was pretty cool to see the first connection, even though it aborted when it couldn’t figure out my ip address. I made some more changes, and it worked!!

The next step was to fire up gns3 and build a simple 2 area decnet network and see if a NT box from area one could connect to a bbs in area two. And with a few false starts I finally got a working multi area network (decnet isn’t like tcpip!!) This document on cisco’s site was invaluable.

Simple GNS DECnet network

As you can see this is pretty simple. I wanted two serial connections so I could run DECnet on one serial connection, and TCP/IP on the other. This way I could shut down the TCP/IP connection to ensure my conversation was 100% over DECnet.

As you can see the configuration is pretty simple. I went with RIP because it’s a small network, and I only need a few routes. EIRP, OSPF and friends are just pure overkill. And recall VMNet8 is the NAT interface provided by VMWare Player.

Checking output from the routers, shows that DECnet is routing, and that I can ping both of my test NT boxes:

And I have to say, it’s pretty impressive! Previous flies on my system, having owned a cube, I can say that the 68030 on this is WAY faster. And I’ve always read about 0.8, and kind of figured it was basically lost to the winds of time. It’s really cool to see it boot up! And the emulated disks are so much faster than the magnetic optical drives of the day.

It’s amazing to think that in 1988, the current world of iThings had just started.